You may or may not have heard of this nasty little attempt at extortion, but a screen suddenly comes up on the infected computer saying you have been doing everything from viewing child pornography to running pirated software to downloading "warez." They attempt to extort a "fine" via MoneyPak and have a clock that ticks down indicating the time you have to pay the fine.

The following image is almost exactly what appeared, though it was modified to read, "Illinois Cyber Crime":

I'm not going to worry about removal, though. I'm simply going to wipe the hard drive and install Linux. The virus is written for Windows and will not install on Linux (no registry). My father uses the computer only for light Internet browsing, and has run Linux before. With me here, he'll hardly know the difference.

You gotta watch for this one. I half suspect my nephew downloaded something (or several somethings!) that had this riding along with it. It's a rather insidious little piece of malware, and I can't even log in in Safe mode.

See my post in the security section. The delivery method for this infection is a clone of what the NAS is using for their purposes. The interesting thing about it is that the malware program is available for rent to any bad guy that wants it. Apparently it can't be purchased.

Anytime something or someone requests payment via a Green Dot card, or Money Pak, there is a 99.999% chance it is a SCAM.These methods of payment, like a Cashiers Check, have NO RECOURSE. It's the same as handing someone CASH with NO RECEIPT. You money is NOT Recoverable! Even after you find out you've been Scammed, it is NOT Recoverable.

It's now a done deal. My father was going to throw the computer out the window; instead, I've thrown Windows out of the computer. I completely deleted all the partitions on the hard drive and created new ones in which I installed Linux Mint 13 (LTS).

After a bit of setup, Dad is now happily browsing the Internet with no problems, and I'm spared the constant headache of keeping Windows up to date and virus free.

If nothing else, the boot time...well, I don't think I need to mention that! It boots blindingly fast, and considering Dad's computer requirements, it should remain blindingly fast.

Yes, everything is much faster and simpler, considering the Cinnamon DTE mimics the old way of doing things, which Windows 7 hardly does. For someone that is, and always has been, computer illiterate, that's a boon. You click on an icon on the desktop, and away you go.

It's nice for me, too, since starting in 2008, I swerved away from the M$ way of doing things and towards Linux. I've forgotten much of what I used to know about Windows, and have learned a great deal of the Linux way. I can maintain Linux Mint far easier than Windows, and it's nowhere near as vulnerable to virii or malware.

That's not to say it's not subject to browser-specific malware. For that, I have NoScript and Ad Block+, which I've slowly been training to allow or block specific scripts from the sites that Dad frequents. As a casual user, he's already using the computer without the necessity of questioning me, so I think I can say, mission accomplished.

I don't know why we couldn't get Mint Maya to work on my computers. I tried it before going the pure Debian route.Perhaps it was for the better, since Debian is base that both Ubuntu and Mint are built on top of.

As an aside, the publishing company I use, although they don't let most submitters know about it yet.They are finding .odf and .odt files to produce cleaner conversions that .doc files. And although I haven't checked lately (in about two months), most will not accept .docx files as submissions, because Mickey$oft does not comply with the XML standards. They stick proprietary coding into the XML and call it .docx.docx is just not compatible with the standard XML way of handling text, so is causing publishers all kinds of problems.

Ah, and I wonder how long it's going to take the rest of them to catch on to that fact and go the FOSS route? The more proprietary M$ makes its products (and change them constantly), the more problematic it becomes for others to use the documents they generate. I don't know about anyone else, but that would be extremely off-putting to me, were I required to constantly change my software to deal with theirs.

I find it interesting that Caliber's preferred text file format for conversion to eBook format is odt. In fact, I think there is a Libre/Open Office add-on that will do the conversion to ePub from Writer. I'm not sure whether M$ Office has a similar feature.

What drives me nuts, is the computer based e-readers do not show the same output as independent units.Yet our submissions are checked using whatever computer based e-reader we have to verify it looks ok before publishing.But none I've found yet, show what an actual stand alone e-reading device shows, and even all of them are different too.

Calibre is what converts .odt to epub, and it looks perfect in Calibre. That is until you SAVE the file and load it back into Calibre from it's output format. Then it looks entirely different than what it showed previously.The older E-Ink Kindle, when reading a .mobi file, looks a whole lot different than the same file does on their Color Kindle. The color Kindle removes all the space formatting required by the E-Ink Kindle to make it look right.

Absolutely! I've always used Nook, so I've only dealt with epub, a FOSS format. I've played hell trying to embed my special font, though you're supposed to be able to do it through Calibre. I bring it up in Calibre on my computer and it looks fine, but when I side-loaded the file into my Nook, the font would not display.

I've tried everything, including playing with it in Sigil, but to no avail. I haven't tried it on my new Nook HD+, but I'm not too optomistic about any success there. I realize there is only so much room on these devices, but one would think that they would at least make it (easily) possible to do something as simple as embed fonts in an epub (or mobi, or any other eReader format) document.

It has to be possible, otherwise they wouldn't offer the functionality in Calibre, Sigil, and assumedly other editors of the sort, but apparently it isn't easy, and there seems to be a paucity of simple, easy to understand instructions on how to do so. And as you say, formatting in other areas is a nightmare to match between different devices, even by the same manufacturers.

All the improvements are great, but we need some form of standardization, lest we become trapped in the pitfall of Smashwords' meatgrinder, having to generate many different outputs in many different formats. It all gets tangled up and makes it exceedingly difficult to publish properly, and some readers are invariably disgruntled when the book they just purchased doesn't display properly.

I think the biggest problem is places like Smashwords make you use a .doc file for the upload.And the only way to get a Font embedded into an e-book is using a style sheet (CSS) directing the e-reader to the Font's Folder, where you have the Font installed as an OTF font. TTF has glitches in e-readers, so it's best to convert a TTF to OTF.

Every professionally formatted e-book I've seen is done in XHTML/CSS, then somehow they make the .mobi and .epub from that. Which is where I get totally lost.

I was looking into an interesting way of doing PDF files, just for e-readers. The text is not flowable, however, you can make it continuous. And make it readable on small e-readers. Looks like H on a computer screen, with that large font. But when scaled down to e-reader size, it's not too small, as most PDF files are.

FWIW: Most newer e-readers, their owners can install different fonts manually. The frau picked up an e-book that had a notice that the book is best read if fonts such n such and such n such are installed on your e-reader. And it gave a link to a place to download them. Whether to trust an external link from someone you don't know will go over or not is anybodies guess.